MindComet

Email Design Showcase

I thought I would take this post to present a few emails that I’ve been impressed with recently. The emails below have landed in my inbox within the past month and all have exceptional designs for their own unique reasons.

eROI: Sales / Marketing Blast

I love everything about this email, from the subject line, the content blocks & calls to action… Especially the overall design with the cutting board & bread.  They really seem to nail the tone with this blast—beckoning to join their team if you’re currently unhappy with your online marketing efforts and general presence on the web. I’d really like to know the stats for this email, what the terms of success were and how many conversions they scored.

Jupiter Images: Special Deal / Promotion

I can honestly say that I’ve never seen an email designed this way.  Although, it lacks any HTML supporting text (it’s basically just 3 images in their own table row), the idea behind the design is a winner.  The angles drew me in… I scanned the entire email and spent a lot of time below the fold once I got there, inspecting the smaller images carefully.  Points off for not hot-linking the “EMAIL US AT” call to action to the email addresses, but all and all great job.

Blue Sky Factory: Sales / Marketing Blast

I can’t remember ever receiving an email with a newspaper / traditional newsletter design.  And for that reason, this email really made an impression on me.  It may also be due to it’s simplistic nature, the small call to action on the bottom right hand corner, its good balance of imagery and text, or how it makes the case that email marketing still works and still consistently provides the highest ROI out of any other form of marketing.  Either way, it put a smile on my face.

If you have received any exceptionally designed emails recently, post them below!

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Posted by MindComet on Nov. 14, 2008

Major SPAM Distributor Taken Down by Feds

Have you noticed a drop in the amount spam being delivered to you recently? If so, this may be due to the fact that one of the largest SPAM firms was taken offline.  McColo Corp, based out of San Jose, California was hosting servers by a relatively small firm that served (no pun intended) as a means to deliver a significant amount of the world’s SPAM. McColo’s client list doesn’t hold up as far as integrity goes.  Their ‘clients’ include companies that sell knock off pharmaceuticals & handbags as well as child porn—all via email.

As soon as their site and servers were pulled, spam volumes dropped worldwide—as much as 66 percent in some cases.  Spamcop, the absolute authority on SPAM, saw 40 spam emails per second drop down to 10 per second. The graph can be found below:

McColo’s fate is not ultimately sealed, but it seems as though they’re S.O.L. Mark Rasch, a former cyber-crime prosecutor for the Justice Department claims that “It’s a little bit like a landlord who owns a building and sees people coming in and out of the apartment complex constantly at all hours and not suspecting their may be drug activity going on.“ Sure, they can play dumb all they want, but they more than likely knew of the fishy behavior occurring through their servers.

This is a major score for all of us legit email senders as well as anyone who is inundated with irrelevant, spammy email.

You can read the entire story at msnbc.com.  It’s worth the read.  Thanks to Greg Cangialosi for pointing this out.

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Posted by MindComet on Nov. 13, 2008

Retail Friends and Family Programs

I’ve seen more and more retail brands make great use out of their Friends and Family programs.  Gap is running a promotion over the next 4 days for members of their Friends and Family to “Give & Get”. 

Friends and Family of the Gap are given the option to shop at the Gap, Old Navy, Banana Republic or all three stores, saving 30% off their purchases and in return, Gap is giving 5% of what they spend to the non profit of their choosing from the list provided.  Even better, if Gap’s preferred customers pass the message along to their friends and family, they will receive the same discount and 5% of their purchase(s) will go to their choice of non profit.  Non profits include: WWF, Boys and Girls Clubs of America, care, The Global Fund, Dress for Success and the GAP Foundation. 

Gap is trying to raise $3 million for the non profits during this particular Give & Get event.  During their August Give & Get event, Gap was able to donate $1.3 million dollars to the non profits. If you’re interested in giving back, leave a comment and we’ll the pass the message along to you.

What perfect timing to knock off some of that holiday shopping and why wouldn’t you want to shop for a great cause?!

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Posted by MindComet on Nov. 12, 2008

From Junk Folder to Inbox

I was doing my random scanning of my inbox that I use for collecting emails that I dont read on a regular basis but like to see what marketers are up to and noticed well established brand’s messages were landing in my spam/junk folder.  One in particular stuck out to me, being 1-800-Flowers.  Although its not Valentines day where I imagine it’s 1-800-Flowers busiest time of year, with the holidays approaching where flowers, table settings or gifts may be purchased I wanted to provide some tips to help ensure not only 1-800-Flowers message lands in the inbox but other email marketers messages do as well.

From an initial overview of 1-800-Flowers emails, I noticed a few things instantly that could relate to the messages being sent to the junk folder.  With that, to avoid your message from going unnoticed prior to sending out your message:

• Avoid the use of spammy keywords
• Avoid use of all CAPS in the subject line
• Avoid punctuation in the subject line such as exclamation points, question marks, etc.

• Test your subject lines and HTML against spam scoring tools, so if you want to use the word, ‘free’ for instance, you’ll have a better idea of whether the email will be flagged or not
• Avoid sending to recipients who are not opening your messages
• Do not fill my inbox with your messages, especially if I’m not opening them
• Avoid using 1-800, 1-888 numbers in the body of the email

Things to avoid in an email all depend on how you use them of course and in reading, have come across a tip on avoiding the use of 1-800 or 1-888 numbers within the email content.  Since 1-800 plays a large part in regards to 1-800-Flowers brand I wanted to determine if this was its route cause for its messages being delivered to my spam/junk folder.  I ran the email through a spam rating tool and the email was in fact dinged for spam but it was noted under the reply to address as being spammy.  Something interesting to test further would be to determine if it was marked as spam due to the reply to address including 1-800 or the fact that the email itself was marked as spam for over messaging to its audience since it shares the address with the ‘From’ address.  I did not compare the spam score against another spam scoring tool so it would be interesting to see how it matches up. 

Fortunately 1-800-Flowers has a well established brand name so people know where to go when they need flowers however subscribers may be missing out on the great deals and offers 1-800 Flowers has to offer.  With that, to reinstate the main message of this post, testing is critical.  Depending on the detail of your QA department or what spam scoring tools provide you, it never hurts to send a live message to yourself and multiple email clients especially when dealing with the BtoC audience to see where your message ends up (spam folder or inbox) and if its worthy of being read once found.  Lastly upon your message being delivered, find out where it ends up and if it is in fact the junk folder, take the corrective measures to ensure it doesn’t happen the next time round.

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Posted by MindComet on Nov. 11, 2008

Obama & Email

The dust from the fiery presidential election has settled.  Obama will be our next commander-in-chief.  Its no doubt that he ran a remarkable online campaign, embracing all social networks and communities.  But most importantly, he utilized email and proved that it was one of the most powerful and significant facets of his campaign—driving it ultimately to success.

Since August of this year, I was sent 110 emails.  They came in at nearly a daily basis, holding my attention throughout the life-cycle of the campaign.  He even announced Biden as his running mate with an email!  But now that the campaign is over, what will be done with all of the email addresses collected?  In the last message delivered, he stated “I’ll be in touch soon about what comes next.“  Will Obama keep his momentum going and maintain the direct line of communication to his supporters? I sure hope so.

It would be such a shame if he only communicated to the American people via mass media outlets from here on out.  I would love to continue to get updates and information directly from my president through twitter, myspace and especially email.  I think he should continue to embrace the technologies he used to win the presidency.

What do you think?  Comment below.

Thanks to Kirk Bentley’s thread at the EMC for some insight on this.

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Posted by MindComet on Nov. 06, 2008

Using Current Events as Part of Email Strategy

Election day is here and marketers are taking advantage which started with offering free coffee or doughnuts to those that voted, which was short lived due to legal ramifications to email marketers tweaking their email messages to include election related key words such as the word “Vote” in subject lines to capture readers attention. 

A few that made it to my inbox that included the keyword “vote” in the subject line were from:

From: Zazzle.com
Subject Line: Vote! Plus $3 off shirts at Zazzle - Ends today
(Just as the polls will close today, so does your chance at getting $3 off)

From: Ann Taylor LOFT
Subject Line: Vote for Great Style: 25% OFF Dresses, Skirts & Work Essentials - Online Only
(Targeting online shoppers, opposed to creating an sense of urgency as Zazzle is doing)

From: SportsAuthority.com
Subject Line: Sports Authority Election Sale The Winner Is You Tonight Only
(Emphasizing online shopping only, a discount and the time (9pm election night - tomorrow at 8am EST) so while we are all waiting for the polls to close and hear who our next President will be, why not kill some time by shopping online)

From: Lands’ End
Subject Line: Free Shipping gets our vote - no minimum order
(Highlighting free shipping, election day only)

From: dELiA*s
Subject Line: You Voted! Shop Our Best Sellers + Free Shipping
(Not sure how they know I voted but since I did, they are giving me easy access to view their best selling items and take advantage of free shipping on orders over $25)

All of the above retail email campaigns leveraged something slightly different in their marketing messages yet all focused on the keyword “vote” in the subject line.  If you had to vote for which campaign would perform the best in regards to sales conversions (assuming that is the overall goal for each message, which would you give your vote to?

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Posted by MindComet on Nov. 04, 2008